Naked at Lunch (12 page)

Early nudist magazines are almost comical in the way they had to pose the models, twisting their bodies so that the women’s breasts were prominent but the pubic area was turned away, or airbrushing genitalia out altogether so that nudists playing catch on the beach looked more like Mattel toys with a pixilated smudge for a crotch.

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American nudism was never a wildly popular fad like it had been in Germany before the war, but it was gaining converts. According to naturist historian Lee Gregory, “In 1949 there were 30 naturist clubs and 3,000 members nationwide in the American Sunbathing Association.”
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By 1964 there were approximately 140 nudist camps across the country, 100 of them members of the ASA.
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As more and more people began trying nonsexual social nudism, cultural references became more common; nudists and nudist colonies were often used as material by comedians. Here’s a classic: “Q. How can you spot the blind guy at the nudist colony? A. It’s not hard.”

Badda boom!

Nudist-themed films, which had struggled after the Motion Picture Production Code
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was enacted in 1930, slowly began to find audiences. Titillating titles like
Garden of Eden
(1954),
For Members Only
(1960),
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Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls
(1963),
Take Off Your Clothes and Live
(1963), and
Girls Come Too!
(1968)
portrayed the nudist lifestyle as natural, healthy, and—just like the AANR does today—decidedly nonsexual.

Mark Storey writes in
Cinema Au Naturel
, “To the degree that nudists were involved in the making of a nudist film, they would have been intent on mitigating the preconceived notions in the public’s mind that the camps and clubs were havens for sexual libertines and host to daily orgies.”
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The films had the additional challenge of not showing pubic hair, avoiding full-frontal nudity, and dodging any depiction of sexual behavior. That they had to be entertaining, on some level, goes without saying. Storey describes the standard plot of nudist-themed films as “girl is introduced to nudism, girl discovers innocent delight there, girl finds the man of her dreams.”

Nudist films were not box office hits and it took a popular film to give the general public an idea of what a nudist camp might be like.
A Shot in the Dark
(1964) is the second in the successful series of Pink Panther
films, with British actor Peter Sellers portraying the bumbling Inspector Clouseau of the French police. This installment features the inspector’s hilariously awkward visit to a nudist camp called Camp Sunshine. It is arguably the best example of how nudism and nudist clubs were portrayed in mainstream culture in the early 1960s and it’s a fantastic bit of comedy; taking off his clothes to go undercover, Clouseau covers his genitals with an acoustic guitar as he tries to find a suspect lounging in the “recreation area.”

But it’s the depiction of Camp Sunshine that is perhaps more revealing of the public’s fantasy of what a nudist camp might be like. Clouseau walks past a naked jazz band playing a riff on Henry Mancini’s Pink Panther theme, while naked men and women—their backs to the camera—groove to the music under a stand of pine trees. The inspector makes his way to a small lake where groups of nudists sit in chairs and a man and a woman standing a few feet apart from each other toss a beach ball back and forth. This scene, perhaps more than any other, gave the general public the idea that nudist colonies were jazzy centers of male-female beach-ball-tossing fun times.

In 1995, in a switcheroo of acronyms, the ASA was renamed the AANR and the mission became, as Gloria Waryas, the current president of AANR-East, said in a recent interview, “predominantly a vendor-driven organization.”
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That is, it sold memberships and promoted the pleasures of nude recreation in official nudist clubs.

Presently there are AANR-affiliated nudist clubs in almost all fifty states—Arkansas, North and South Dakota, Mississippi, and Alaska being notable exceptions.

Show Me Acres—“For those who enjoy the beauty of bareness!”—is fairly typical of a well-appointed landed club. The resort has more than three hundred acres of woodlands in the Missouri Ozarks, as well as a large swimming pool and clubhouse. Typical of clubs in less temperate climates, Show Me Acres is open from May to September and only on weekends. It hosts a “Hawaiian Luau Potluck Weekend” and a “Christmas in July” party in addition to barbecue and chili cook-off competitions. One of the things I like about Show Me Acres, in addition to having a state-specific name that also acts as a clever double entendre,
is that unlike many nudist clubs, it allows singles.

Another example of a landed club would be Serendipity Park, about a ninety-minute drive from Atlanta, Georgia. They are “6-time national award winners for outstanding friendliness” and, judging from some of the activities they mention on their Facebook page, like “hot tub beer pong” and a “pirate costume party,” it does sound like a friendly place. Like other landed clubs it has a pool, wooded areas, cabins for rent, and campgrounds.

There are dozens more landed clubs: Prairie Haven in Scranton, Kansas; Bare Backers Nudist Club in Boise, Idaho; Shangri La Ranch in New River, Arizona; White Tail Resort in Ivor, Virginia; the Willamettans Family Nudist Resort in Springfield, Oregon; Solair Recreation League in Woodstock, Connecticut; Gymno-Vita Park in Vandiver, Alabama; and Cypress Cove Nudist Resort and Spa in Kissimmee, Florida, to name just a few.

Non-landed—a.k.a. travel clubs—are different. They don’t have acres of land or pools or clubhouses. They have to find their nude adventures where and when they can. A good example of a non-landed AANR-affiliated club is the Hill Country Nudists of Austin, Texas, which hosts one or two skinny-dipping events a year and does monthly outreach meetings preaching the gospel of nonsexual social nudism to Texans. Like a typical landed club, the Hill Country Nudists holds wine tastings and themed potluck dinners, movie nights, and parties with live music. Unlike landed clubs, it sometimes has to deal with the public and public spaces, like Hippie Hollow, a designated nude beach on nearby Lake Travis, or when it hosted a moonlight bike ride through downtown Austin.

The North Carolina Naturists is another non-landed club, but unlike the Austin nudists who have Hippie Hollow, the North Carolinians tend to meet in their backyards and homes for nude potluck dinners and pool parties, like the Valentine’s Day luncheon hosted by members Karen and Jim or a pool party at Frank and Rhonda’s. How strange would it feel to be a new member sitting in Karen’s kitchen, eating red velvet cake with a bunch of nudists? Maybe not that strange at all.

I’d had a taste of American club nudism at the Desert Sun Resort, and while it gave me one view of what nude recreation could be, I felt like if I was ever going to understand what would make a person want to go to a nude potluck dinner, it was time to get serious. I had to jump into the deep end of the culture. So I booked my tickets, packed the bare minimum of clothing into a small carry-on suitcase, and headed for the motherland of nonsexual social nudism. Europe.

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Not to be confused with DC Comics’
Legion of Super-Heroes
or
Legion of Doom.

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Fun Fact: Seismologist Charles Frances Richter and his wife were frequent guests.

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Judge Voelker was also an accomplished novelist and author of the bestseller
Anatomy of a Murder.

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Of course there were other nudist organizations in the early days. The American Gymnosophical Association (AGA), for example, was one of the groups that split off from the ALPC in 1930. It was run by a sociology professor named Maurice Parmelee and had its own resort at the Rock Lodge Club in the New Jersey countryside. But the AGA was small and, like other upstart organizations, never grew to possess the clout that “Uncle Danny” Boone’s ASA had or the AANR still has. Nonetheless, the Rock Lodge Club is still an active nudist club and an affiliate of AANR.

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Better known as the Hays Code, a set of moral guidelines defining what was acceptable in motion pictures.

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Also known as
The Nudist Story
and
Pussycat Paradise.

Vera Playa

T
he experienced sunbathers rise with the morning light and claim the best chairs around the pool. This is about real estate—location, location, location—and these are the positions that promise optimal conditions. The old pros can read the movements of the sun like an astronomer, calculating what time a shadow might fall across their position; they know how far they are from a cool dip in the water, the relative distance to the bar and bathrooms. Their skin is smooth—body hair only gets in the way of the sunlight—and uniformly deep brown and leathered. If you can imagine Dutch actor Rutger Hauer turned into a purse, you’ve got the picture.

By nine the best seats have been claimed. Amateurs will have to settle for the fringes, chairs that are far from the pool and under palm trees that offer only dappled exposure to the sun.

On the beach a naked man jogs past, his penis whipping wildly in circles like a rubber chicken. He passes a group of topless women doing some kind of stretching exercise. They reach their hands up to the sky and then swing their torsos from side to side. It’s not yoga. I don’t know what it is. I’m still drinking my coffee.

It wasn’t easy to get to Vera Playa. I flew from Los Angeles to Dallas to Madrid to the dusty coastal town of Almería in southwestern Spain. From there I rented a Fiat 500 and drove another hour through the beautiful and desolate Spanish desert until I finally circumnavigated my way through the maze of roundabouts and gated
urbanizaciónes
—what we would call apartment complexes or condominiums—and found myself in front of the Hotel Vera Playa Club.

As I checked in I was greeted by the sight of what appeared to be a tribe of naked people surrounding a large swimming pool and, for a brief moment, I had a flash of what Captain Cook must’ve felt when he landed on the shores of Kealakekua Bay. Except here I wasn’t set upon by warriors and beaten to death; I was met with benign indifference.

The Hotel Vera Playa Club has the unique honor of being the only naturist hotel in Spain and the centerpiece for what is arguably the largest naturist development in the world. And yes, it seems to me that the words in its name are in the wrong order too. But the hotel is lovely, with a soaring atrium painted a shocking blue and lined with decorative tile.

I walked past a massive birdcage next to the entrance and a large tropical parrot twisted his neck sideways at me and squawked. Could the parrot, who must’ve been accustomed to naked humans by now, see that I was a pretender? An interloper in the land of naturists? I realized that if a single avian squawk could send my brain spinning into paranoid fantasies, then I was feeling somewhat unnerved being in a clothing-optional city.

Past the lobby is the pool area, the main stage for nude activities, a large biomorphic structure with shallows for small children and water slides built to look like a pile of boulders. While the pool gives off a
Flintstones
vibe, the massive terra-cotta-tiled area surrounding it is more like a giant tandoori oven built for the slow roasting of human flesh. Hundreds of chaise lounges are scattered under a grove of palm trees. If you’re like me and hear your dermatologist’s voice echoing in your head, you can position your chair in the shade, and if you’re a member of the smooth-skinned sun-worshipping elite, you can catch all the Spanish rays you desire.

It was only my second visit to a nudist resort and I was feeling vaguely debutante-ish as I strode out toward the pool wearing nothing but a half a can of sunscreen and a pink towel slung over my shoulder. It wasn’t that I was nervous exactly. I’m not worried about what someone might think of my body and I had learned from my first experience to be prudent in applying the sunscreen so as not to make my penis look like it had been freshly Turtle Waxed. It’s more like being invited to join a club but, aside from the hygienic stricture to always sit on a towel, no one had really explained the club’s rules to me. Maybe there weren’t any.

Where there had been a formality to people’s behavior in Palm Springs, here that formality was replaced by a refreshing normality—in Vera Playa people were just getting on with their vacation. There were the typical elderly couples roasting their hunched and saggy carcasses in the sun, but also middle-aged men and women, young professionals, a smattering of hipsters from Barcelona, and lots of families with children.